How to Optimise Customer Touchpoints to Grow Your Business

What are customer touchpoints? They’re the many points of customer contact that your business encounters from beginning to end. This includes things like seeing your post on social media, visiting your website, scrolling through product pages, seeing an online ad, and so on.

These touchpoints are a key part of the customer journey. If you learn how to optimise all of your customer touchpoints, then it can help you improve the overall customer experience. As a result, this creates more opportunities to generate leads, increase sales, and grow your business.

So, there are two main questions here, and the big one is how do you optimise all of these touchpoints?

But, before we dive into that, it’s crucial to know why you should do this…

Why optimise customer touchpoints?

Simply put, optimising touchpoints allows you to give something extra to a potential customer. You make their experience far more pleasant, which almost guides them along their journey from start to finish.

By doing this, you will generate more leads. You will be able to convert more of these leads into customers, which ultimately results in more sales. A good business that makes sales and boosts its profit margins will inevitably grow.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, it’s time to look at how you go about things. Below, I’ve laid out a few ideas to help you get started:

Improve the customer experience on your website

Your website is going to be one of the most significant customer touchpoints. People will land on your site if they find out about you from a friend or follow your link on social media/search engines. So, it’s up to you to ensure that you make a good impact when they interact with your site.

There are some key things to consider here, and the first is website design and layout. Ensure that your site actually looks good and is a positive reflection of your brand. People need to feel comfortable on your site, so it has to look modern and be easy for them to navigate. Also, the loading speeds have to be almost instant. The longer it takes for your pages to load, the less chance there is of a potential customer hanging around. Fast loading speeds improve customer experience and optimise this touchpoint.

Furthermore, think about your product pages. Make sure you have great images of your products, and possibly even videos to show them off in more detail. A great addition to product pages is a 360 view tool where people can view your product and move the image to see it from all angles. Include rich descriptions of your products and as much info as possible to give your customers everything they need to be influenced into making a purchase.

Work on customer support

It doesn’t matter if a customer is just starting their journey or right near the end of it, you have to make customer support a key priority. If someone needs help or advice, then this is a customer touchpoint. They look for ways to get in touch with your business, and the way you handle things will play a role in their overall experience.

For example, imagine someone is on your website viewing a product, but they want information on delivery costs or if you deliver to their country. If there’s no clear or instant way of getting this info, then it decreases the chances of them actually moving forward with the purchase. But, if you have something like a FAQ page or Live Chat Support, then they can get the answers they need right away.

These are two examples of things that help optimise this customer touchpoint, and there are others as well. Creating a contact page that gives people all your different methods of customer support is so beneficial as they can now choose how to contact you. Using social media to reply to customers is also extremely positive as it means people can get in touch at any stage of the customer journey. Someone might see one of your Tweets and want to direct message you or reply to it for more info.

The bottom line is that you need to be accessible and open up numerous customer support avenues. The easier it is for someone to contact you, the better their experience becomes.

Speed up your online checkout

It’s common to assume that, once someone has added your product to their shopping cart, they’re going to buy it. But, people may have second thoughts if one of your final touchpoints isn’t optimised; the checkout.

Ensure that you make it as easy as possible for someone to buy a product from you. Don’t force them to go through a lengthy registration process – include a simple guest checkout, or implement express checkouts like PayPal or Amazon. Express checkouts are fantastic as it basically lets the customer click a button and order their items in a matter of seconds. They don’t need to fill out any forms or put in delivery info as it’s already there for them. Also, adding the ability to save payment details can help speed up future purchases too.

In essence, you want someone to go to their shopping cart and quickly go through with the purchase. If you make life simple for them, more people will actually buy your products instead of letting them linger in their online shopping cart.

Audit your customer experience

Lastly, one of the best things you can do is carry out an audit on your customer experience. This lets you analyse and look at all the different touchpoints, highlighting which ones are causing you the most issues. By understanding what needs to be improved, you can focus on these things instead of wasting time on touchpoints that are already fully optimised.

If you’re looking for an easy and effective way of doing this, download my free Customer Experience Self-Audit tool. This will do everything for you; it highlights the touchpoints you have to improve and presents the data in a format that’s easy to understand. Now, you can enhance the customer experience by optimising customer touchpoints, which allows you to increase sales, find more leads, and grow your business.

Optimise and Grow Online / About Author

Strategic Optimisation + Growth consultant for lean start-ups and change-making entrepreneurs enabling them to grow their business in a sustainable and profitable way. My super-powers are customer experience optimisation, SEO, and leveraging data insights for business growth. #fuelledbycoffee

Strategies and Solutions to develop, optimise and grow your business online utilising automation and integration for maximum efficiency, whilst keeping customer experience the centrepoint of all marketing and operations.